Beyond American Dystopia: On the Rise of Apocalyptic Visions in the Contemporary United States
Stefan Höhne1 The Future’s Not What It Used to Be
According to recent media discourse, American contemporary life has finally managed to imitate art, specifically dystopian fiction. Especially in recent years, countless journal articles, TV reports, books, think pieces, and op-eds have claimed again and again that the United States is presently nothing more or less than a dystopian nightmare realized. A flood of headlines—for example, “Trump’s America Is like a Dystopian Novel” (Feffer), “California Is Living America’s Dystopian Future” (LeMenager), or simply “America Is a Dystopia” (RajendraNicolucci)—present grim and cynical assessments of current political, social, and economic conditions, often with fatalistic undertones.
Comparing American society to a dystopian fantasy-turned-reality has also become the basis for memes on social media, as well as the topic of millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and Reddit threads. At the same time, large and small screens have been flooded with highly successful dystopian stories for all demographics, from movies like The Hunger Games and Divergent to TV series like The Walking Dead and The Handmaid’s Tale
Along with this recent surge of tropes in both popular entertainment and political analysis, dystopian narratives have taken on new meanings and functions. While dystopianism has traditionally been employed to warn us of a grim future, often serving as a cautionary tale of possible technological, economic, and environmental dangers, in recent years it has become more exigent and urgent. It has also transformed into something else: namely, a powerful reflection of the present. Even after the 2020 elections, with the Trump administration voted out, these interpretations do not seem to be decelerating.
Of course, at first glance, many societal symptoms in contemporary America appear to support such dark and hopeless descriptions: an outof-control police force arrests people for any reason and regularly shoots them dead (especially if they are not White); a deeply corrupt and nihilistic political class operates hand in hand with a crypto-fascist administration; massive economic disparities deepen by the day; technology-driven surveillance pervades all aspects of life; a murderous deportation regime is deeply entrenched from border to border; a deadly pandemic spreads out of control; and the effects of global climate crisis are more and more severely felt each year. Reading through these often compelling diagnoses, one may well wonder: If the hellhole of despair that is the United States today does not constitute a realized dystopia, what does?
However, while these diagnoses and narratives may be fitting, they are often based on a set of problematic assumptions and blind spots, especially with regard to race, that can be fatalistic and counterproductive to social change. In the following, I want to explore the conventional genealogy of White-authored dystopian thought and highlight some of its historical dynamics and themes. I will discuss some of the problems that arise from buying into the rhetoric of America as a dystopian society, and conclude by offering some alternatives.
2 Histories of Dark Futures
Dystopian thought, both in fiction and in relation to a diagnosis of the times and critique of contemporary society, is hardly a new phenomenon. While not as old as its optimistic twin, utopianism, which can be traced back at least to Thomas More’s famous 1516 book, Utopia , the genre nonetheless stretches back more than two centuries. As Gregory Claeys shows in his insightful 2017 study, Dystopia: A Natural History, it originated as a form of satire and parody of utopian ideas of the Enlightenment, including the French Revolution. In the late nineteenth century, dystopianism became a way to comment on and critique the massive socio-political transformations erupting in Europe and North America. By the early twentieth century, it had found its defining themes in dark assessments of the impact of scientific discoveries and technology, as well as in bleak scenarios of oppressive and dictatorial social order. Despite growing in relevance and producing some seminal works that drew upon fascination with Bolshevism and fascism, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), dystopianism was relatively marginal in comparison to the increasingly utopian ideals and projects that characterized the first decades after World War II, in the United States and beyond. After the widespread upheavals of the 1960s, however, this began to change, as pessimistic and apocalyptic visions of near and distant futures slowly became more prominent in both fiction and politics. Following the late David Graeber, we can date this turning point quite precisely. As he argues in his
essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” (2015), it was in the early 1970s that utopian thought started to fade, eventually replaced by dark dystopian imaginaries and predictions. Novels like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and movies like The Omega Man (1971), or Alvin Toffler’s non-fiction bestseller Future Shock (1970), each paint grim pictures of a near-future United States, with its population suffering from alienation, anomy, technological takeover, or social and environmental collapse.
What becomes apparent in the White-authored hegemonic dystopian discourse from this era is a deep sense of disillusionment with the American promise of freedom, liberty, and equality. Furthermore, if their—predominantly male—creators are often motivated by a feeling of betrayal and a promise unfulfilled, one has to ask what this promise actually entailed and when exactly it was broken—and by whom. For Graeber, one crucial factor is what he calls “technological disappointment” (109). The era between the end of World War II and the 1970s was fueled by technological optimism and faith in a more just and egalitarian society brought about by innovations. While manned space travel sparked public imaginations of a limitless, expansive future for humankind, the 1950s and 1960s also witnessed a flood of advancements in medicine, such as vaccines, birth control pills, and in vitro fertilization. These advances sparked visions of abandoning traditional models of family and reproduction, potentially allowing more freedom for women. Around the same time, American consumers, especially from the White middle class, experienced a surge of new technologies promising a more comfortable and practically labor-free life, from microwave ovens to home air conditioning. In the face of these developments, science fiction and utopian thought experienced something of a media golden age, with the TV series Star Trek as its poster child.
From the early 1970s onwards, however, this rapid pace of technological innovation slowed considerably, while questions of the democratic control of such new technologies took center stage, particularly with respect to nuclear power. For Graeber, the 1970s also marked a profound shift “from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment in technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control” (120), such as telecommunication networks. The relation between technological progress and social emancipation, once assumed to be reliably strong, thus became alarmingly brittle. In the decades to come, far gloomier and more hopeless prospects emerged for human society, as well as the planet itself. Influential studies of the time, such as The Energy Balloon (Udall et al. in 1974) or the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. in 1972), popularized these ideas among the American middle classes and gave these dystopian scenarios a scientific foundation. The resulting skepticism and nihilism were perhaps best vocalized in the battle cry of Europe and North America’s then-emergent punk youth movements: “No Future!”
The rise of dystopian thought from the 1970s onwards comes with a sharpened focus on themes that not only dominated late-twentiethand early-twenty-first-century science fiction, but that have also become central to public discourse today: environmental collapse, the excesses of neo-liberal capitalism and corporate domination, technologies of control, and economic and social upheaval.
Especially in the past decade, these dystopian tropes have increasingly transcended the realm of fiction and entertainment, entering media discourse and political analysis and eventually becoming part of the standard repertoire of journalists, pundits, and politicians. As a result, these cautionary tales transform into astute assessments of the present.
3 Three Modes of Critique
There are several ways to be skeptical of these narratives and diagnoses of a dystopian present, all of which are justified, and all of which miss the point. First, it is possible to critique apocalyptic interpretations of the present by insisting that things are not (yet) bad or grim enough. The United States does not actually have cybernetic RoboCops roaming the streets, omnipotent AI overlords controlling and enslaving its population, or a full-blown climate apocalypse. Simply put, these diagnoses tend to be overly hysterical, distorting political analysis for the sake of exaggerated polemics.
A second form of critique comes from the other end of the spectrum, arguing that the current American dystopia did not newly arrive with Donald Trump or the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, from this view, the United States was rather founded as a dystopia. This point is made for example in a 2020 essay in the online journal OneZero, titled “America Has always Been a Dystopia: Too Many of Us just Haven’t Been Paying Attention.” Author Brian Merchant postulates that for many people in North America, “the real dystopia arrived long ago,” especially for Native Americans, People of Color, the poor, and other marginalized communities. It was only in recent years, perhaps alongside the further deterioration of the middle class, that the intrinsic dystopian nature of the United States has become apparent to a wider group of people, thereby finding its way into mainstream public discourse.
This brings me to a third way of responding critically to these diagnoses, probably the most thought-provoking variation, namely by stating that they present a distorted or utterly insufficiently complex analysis of the actual contemporary dystopian condition of the United States. Most prominently, as dystopian analyses render oppression primarily along lines of class or, less often, gender, they tend to downplay or ignore race as a crucial dimension of technological and totalitarian oppression. Of course, Afrofuturist visions and other traditions of Black science fiction have focused on People of Color for over a century, but until recently, they were largely ignored by mainstream culture. This
remarkable absence of issues of race in many White-authored dystopian narratives is even more remarkable as these works usually rely heavily on existing forms of racism as inspiration for their scenarios. Following cultural critic Angelica Jade Bastién, “[t]he genre hyperconsumes the narratives of people of color—which read as allegories for slavery and colonialism—yet remains starkly white in the casting of major roles, and often refuses to acknowledge race altogether.”
Furthermore, according to this third form of critique, it seems that there is not much to learn from such narratives on how to overcome, abolish, or even reform our allegedly dystopian present. The dominant way to do so, according to most films, series, and novels, would be to rely on (or become) a hero, doing all the work alone or with the help of a small group of supporters. Eventually, this one-person revolutionary force might inspire a vanguard to join the uprising—or in rare cases, even the masses—but this usually only happens after the primary villain (a master tyrant, an evil computer, etc.) has been destroyed. Bastién also points out that “most dystopian films end up ignoring the thorny politics of entrenched systems of oppression in favor of signaling out one lead character who gloriously resists and somehow survives—a conservative narrative that suggests oppression can be overcome if people just try hard enough.” Combine these overly simplistic stories with almost exclusively White protagonists, who are shown as both most affected by tyranny and most able to undo it, and the reactionary, if not counteremancipatory, nature of these narratives becomes apparent.
4 Towards a Dialectical Dystopianism
While the modes of critique briefly sketched above are all more or less valid, I want to close this short piece by offering an even more fundamental criticism of such dystopian analysis, while highlighting possible alternatives.
I want to advance the argument that there is something inherently problematic about dystopian thought as a mode of social and political diagnostics. To make this point clear, we need to look at how ideas related to its optimistic counterpart, utopianism, have been laid out and mobilized in political explorations. All now-famous classic utopian visions, from Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun and Charles Fourier’s Phalanstère to Robert Owen’s New Harmony, present their ideal societies in a perfected form—so well-established that social change seems to be undesired, even unthinkable. The same holds true for the more down-toearth visions of alternative world designs put forward by twentieth-century planners, social engineers, and activists, including Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, or Jane Jacobs’s diverse, scaled-down urban neighborhoods. Conceptualized as ideal social configurations manifest in perfected spatial form, these visions have a strong tendency to become fixed, fundamental, and timeless, thus ren-
dering irrelevant the struggles that would be necessary to establish them. Any transformation towards or beyond this ideal state becomes difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, let alone to realize. David Harvey points out these inherent contradictions of utopianism in his influential study Spaces of Hope (2000). As he puts it: “Utopias of spatial form are typically meant to stabilize and control the processes that must be mobilized to build them. In the very act of realization, therefore, the historical process takes control of the spatial form that is supposed to control it” (172).
Similar contradictions apply to the countless diagnoses of contemporary American society as a realized dystopia. In mobilizing an absolute “presentism” that negates the social dynamics and countercurrents of the present order, such analyses ultimately become fatalistic and hopeless, rather than dynamically critical. In both fiction and political analysis, such perspectives tend to prime us for catharsis or resignation, while offering no possible modes of practice to prevent or reverse the real-life collapse of society.
To escape such cynicism, a different, more dialectical concept of both utopianism and dystopianism might help: not a concept that aims to replace the grim and hopeless present with an alternative ideal society, but one that instead understands utopianism and dystopianism as social processes rather than as spatial formations. Understanding the various actors, historical dynamics, conflicts, and contingencies of contemporary U.S. politics would allow us to develop far deeper interpretations and possible alternatives than does simply pointing to dystopian qualities that are immediately recognizable from fictional accounts. This also entails acknowledging the different circumstances and motivations of people who aim to survive and change the current conditions of oppression and exploitations. As Brian Merchant also points out, the worst we can do right now is “glibly waving off dystopia as some always-approaching, faceless Empire without zeroing in on the nation’s institutional prejudices, its targets for violence, its specific hatreds.” If we continue to wallow in the fatalistic narratives of America as an already-realized dystopian fantasy, we guarantee complicity in turning these scenarios into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Works Cited
Bastién, Angelica Jade. “Why Don’t Dystopias Know How to Talk About Race?” Vulture. New York Media, 4 Aug. 2017. Web. 27 Nov. 2020. https://www.vulture. com/2017/08/why-dont-dystopias-know-how-to-talk-about-race.html Claeys, Gregor. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Print. Feffer, John. “Trump’s America Is like a Dystopian Novel, with One Important Difference.” The Nation. The Nation Company, L. P., 13 Mar. 2017. Web. 25 Nov. 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trumps-america-is-like-adystopian-novel-with-one-importance-difference/. Graeber, David. “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. By Graeber. New York: Melville, 2015. 105-48. Print.
Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print. LeMenager, Stephanie. “California Is Living America’s Dystopian Future.” The Conversation. The Conversation Trust, 4 Nov. 2019. Web. 24 Nov 2020. https://theconversation.com/california-is-living-americas-dystopianfuture-126014
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe, 1972. Print.
Merchant, Brian. “America Has always Been a Dystopia: Too Many of Us just Haven’t Been Paying Attention.” OneZero. Medium, 23 June 2020. Web. 22 Nov. 2020. https://onezero.medium.com/its-always-been-a-dystopia858ef606832f
Rajendra-Nicolucci, Avi. “America Is a Dystopia.” The Michigan Daily, 14 June 2020. Web. 28 Nov. 2020. https://www.michigandaily.com/section/opinion/ op-ed-america-dystopia
Udall, Stewart, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout. The Energy Balloon. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Print.